Writing Like Georges

The Situation

I had intended to emulate Georges for the last section of Project Novella: The Kingdom, but as things turned out, I ended up writing the final 6,212 words in the style of Maya Angelou. I discovered Georges through a Comparative Literature course I took with Daniel Herwitz in the Winter 2016 semester at the University of Michigan. We read his memoir W, or the Memory of Childhood, in which he interweaves the story of his formative years with a description of a fictional, über-competitive society he invented as a child.

Upon discovering he was a member of the French literary group known as Oulipo — what Wikipedia calls "a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques" — and that he had written a novel (A Void) entirely without using the letter "e", I knew I liked this guy. And so, though he didn't receive his own proper section, I inserted a couple nods to this French writer in the novella. These appear in the form of a certain word being retracted and replaced with "———". (I didn't think I'd be able to pull off writing a whole section without using a letter, anyway.)

The Writer: Georges Perec (1936-1982)

— French novelist, filmmaker, documentarian, and essayist

— Born in Paris, France

Quote-worthy: “What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.”

Famous Works

La Disparition (A Void) (1969)
W ou le souvenir d'enfance (W, or the Memory of Childhood) (1975)
La Vie mode d’emploi (Life, a User’s Manual) (1978)

Writing Style

An audacious formal experimenter, as evidenced by a novel written entirely without the letter “e”; a 399-line poem in which each line is an anagram of the poem’s title, and a text consisting solely of a 5,000-letter palindrome
Consistent reflections on loss and disappearance
Wrote novels, novellas, poems and what have you like a puzzle, but in a way that made sense on some level (even if convoluted and/or difficult to reach)
Writing rooted in the everyday, the humble, the minute

Writing Routine & Advice

Write compulsively; that is, produce something everyday
Beyond this point, information concerning Georges' writing routine proved difficult to come by

His tips for writing are essentially non-existent, as well, but he does offer advice on how to arrange a book shelf:
- "This is a trying, depressing operation, but one liable to produce pleasant surprises, such as coming upon a book you had forgotten because you could no longer see it and which, putting off until tomorrow what you will not do today, you finally redevour lying face down on your bed."
- If your shelf runs out of room, Georges proposes these locations: "...between two windows, in the embrasure of an unused door, on the steps of a library ladder, making this unusable (very chic), underneath a window, on a piece of furniture set at an angle and dividing the room into two (very chic, creates an even better effect with a few potted plants)."

Sources